1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to spoken dialog systems and more specifically to a method of providing a modular approach to creating the dialog manager for a particular application.
2. Introduction
The present invention relates to spoken dialog systems and to the dialog manager module within such a system. The dialog manager controls the interactive strategy and flow once the semantic meaning of the user query is extracted. There are a variety of techniques for handling dialog management. Several examples may be found in Huang, Acero and Hon, Spoken Language Processing. A Guide to Theory, Algorithm and System Development, Prentice Hall PTR (2001), pages 886-918. Recent advances in large vocabulary speech recognition and natural language understanding have made the dialog manager component complex and difficult to maintain. Often, existing specifications and industry standards such as Voice XML and SALT (Speech Application Language Tags) have difficulty with more complex speech applications.
Development of a dialog manager continues to require highly-skilled and trained developers. The process of designing, developing, testing and deploying a spoken dialog service having an acceptably accurate dialog manager is costly and time-consuming. As the technology continues to develop, consumers further expect spoken dialog systems to handle more complex dialogs. As can be appreciated, higher costs and technical skills are required to develop more complex spoken dialog systems.
Given the improved ability of large vocabulary speech recognition systems and natural language understanding capabilities, what is needed in the art is a system and method that provides an improved development process for the dialog manager in a complex dialog system. Such improved method should simplify the development process, decrease the cost to deploy a spoken dialog service, and utilize reusable components. In so doing, the improvement method should also enable the author of a dialog system to focus efforts on the key areas of content that define an individual application.